OCES grants make summer service possible

Back to GhanaMary Kate Wise '12 received one of this year's community engagement grants. She will use the grant to help build a public toilet for a community in Ghana. She is pictured here on a previous trip to the country, during which she helped with mobile medical clinics.
Courtesy photo

Two days after she graduates this May, Mary Kate Wise ‘12
will get on a plane and head to Ghana, a place across the world but close to
her heart after taking several trips to the country during her time at William &
Mary.

There, she and about a dozen other students from the Student
Partnership for International Medical Aid (SPIMA) will help a community
construct a public toilet – a much-needed public health commodity.

The project is being sponsored in part through a community
engagement grant that Wise received through the College’s Office of Community
Engagement and Scholarship (OCES). The grant is one of many that were recently
awarded to students to conduct a variety of service projects – from teaching
English to people in Vietnam to helping with flood mitigation in the Dominican
Republic -- throughout the summer.

“This winter, OCES staff member Elizabeth Miller, Austin
Pryor and I honed our application and review process so that our funding is
focused on sustainable social justice projects in Williamsburg, around the U.S.
and the world,” said Melody Porter, assistant director of OCES. “We are
grateful for the partnership of private funders who are invested in projects,
like that of SPIMA, that make a positive impact in communities and offer deep student
learning in the process.”

A Trip Transformed

Wise began her work in Ghana as a sophomore through a SPIMA
trip offered through the Branch Out alternative breaks program. During that
trip, she and other team members helped provide mobile medical clinics to
communities in Ghana.

During her junior year, Wise again went on the trip, this
time as its leader. After that second trip, Wise and her co-leader Gloria
Driessnack ’13 reflected on the experience and began discussing the trip’s
effectiveness. They decided that though
helpful for some short-term problems, the clinics did not offer any long-term
solutions. They were “a Band-Aid solution to a huge gaping wound,” said Wise.

Wise and Driessnack decided to address that wound by first
getting to understand it better. So, on their next trip, they started
collecting data about the people who attended the clinics.

Last summer, with the help of another community engagement
grant, Wise travelled back to Ghana to conduct more research. She and Driessnack
were there for five weeks, and they interviewed more than 600 people. The two
asked them about the biggest health issues the Ghanaians saw in their
communities and what solutions they thought would be the most helpful.

During their research, Wise and Driessnack discovered that
Ghana has a national health insurance plan that is very affordable, so many
people actually have access to health care.

“We didn’t know that until last summer,” said Wise. “Can you
imagine not knowing something that big about health and still trying to help
people?”

In addition, they found that the rural communities often
lack bathrooms – a fact that the SPIMA team had missed on previous trips
because they had always stayed in hotels.

“People just go anywhere because there are no bathrooms or
toilets at all,” said Wise. “Flies carry it to food, and when it rains, it gets
into the water. Sanitation is actually one of the building blocks to good
health. If you fix that, you fix so many problems.”

Based on their research, Wise and Driessnack reorganized the
trip so that it now focuses on one community and building it a public toilet,
which is something the community members had requested.

Most of the money from the community engagement grant is
going to building materials for the toilet. The team of 14 from William &
Mary will help with its construction, but work on the site is already being
conducted by members of the Ghanaian community.

“We really want the community to have ownership,” said Wise.

The SPIMA team will be in Ghana for about three and a half
weeks this summer, and their goal is to finish the toilet before they leave.

Wise is grateful to OCES for providing the grants that
allowed her to reorganize the trip so that it would provide “meaningful
solution to the problems” that she has seen in Ghana.

“I wouldn’t be able to do the work I did without (the
grants),” she said. “It takes that extra mile. A lot of people go on a service
trip and think, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ but you really need to do research on the
community and realize that they know their needs better than you do.”

Although this is the last trip to Ghana for Wise as a
William & Mary student, it will not be her last trip to the country.

“I want to keep doing this,” said Wise, who plans on
studying public health in graduate school. “I know these people, and I see this
need that wants to be fulfilled.”

As for her busy Commencement week – graduation followed by a
flight to Ghana – Wise said it is the “perfect way” to end her time at the
College.